PHIL 12 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Homeopathy, Popular Science
Document Summary
Phil 12 lecture 17 alternative medicine and rcts (continued) Homeopathy works based off of the law of similars. Began experimenting with natural substances through provings": provings: send people into isolated areas, have them take substances and keep diaries about how they"re feeling and the effects they experience. Today bach remedies include: mustard for depression and fatigue, rose for schizophrenia, cuttlefish ink for infertility. Patients did better the more dilute the solution. Began to water down the solutions more and more: diluting, shaking. Strike it a certain number of times: producing tinture". Standard remedies are 30x watered down by a factor of 100, 39 times over. In factories, these are then dissolved in alcohol/sprayed on sugar pills and then sold. Now that we know avogadro"s number, we know that a vial containing the remedy is unlikely to contain a single molecule of the substance: how many molecules in a mole.
